Rhythm. Writing. And the blues.

I started talking really early. I went at a rapid pace from learning new words to building full sentences. By the time I was one-ish, I was speaking in capital letters, commas and italics. Then came the big full stop. I shut up. Completely.

I spent my entire childhood in silence. Silence that poured out of my ears like thick black goo and swallowed me whole. Silence that amputated my limbs and cut out any chances of a social life. Silence that did a massive memory-dump of everything I don’t remember doing between 2 and 20. I thought words were something I would never get along with. Until I chanced upon writing.

That’s when words became my best friends. They gave me a job and defined my career. They gave me a voice and lent me a ear. They coloured my thoughts, exemplified my experiences and made life more meaningful. They proffered a pun to play with, an idiom to iterate and an analogy to allude to alliteratively. They stood by me through fat and thin. They gave me strength to silence the world. Until I opened my mouth again.

I started talking, that too with great difficulty, to get a business going. Polite conversations with new clients. Banal banters with associates. Aggressive negotiations with suppliers. Academic deliberations with colleagues. Moronic debates with old clients. Blah blah blah. There were so many yakkity-yaks jumping the fence in my sleep that I neither had the time, nor the mindspace to write. So, when I decided to restructure my business to focus mainly on writing, the prospects looked frighteningly foreboding.

Perhaps I am not so big with multitasking. Perhaps speaking and writing couldn’t co-exist in my life, like two grumpy grandmas living together. Perhaps I needed all of 30 years to fine-tune both skills, before I could begin to process them simultaneously. But now that I have finally understood their mutual exclusivity, I intend to start chipping away at my future, letter by letter.

So here I am, on the threshold of new beginnings and old age, solemnly vowing that I will start scribbling again. And that’s something I can give you in writing.

Twit or Tweet.

There’s this thing doing the rounds on the Internet that is taunting me. Pussyfooting behind my derrière, pointing its inky fingers and cocking a snook at my fictional writing skills. It calls itself NovelRace and it tweets and superpokes writers into doing something monumental – authoring a 60,000-word novel! And here I am struggling to get a blog going from anywhere mundane to anything but.

How do you even start writing a novel? Or a short story? And why does every blogger and twitterer want, through some Satanic intervention, to morph into the love child of Salman Rushdie and Padma Lakhsmi? The only thing I have in common with said parents is - @mom: I am TamBram; @dad: my folks live in his short story. Almost. Surely, I have a long way to go from there.

Like the foxy wolf (or was he sheepish after all?) in the sour grapes story, I am going to indisputably ignore the race. Unfortunately, that makes me sound like someone who denounces change or admonishes adventure. (He might think he’s taking a stand by saying he doesn’t do stufflikethat. But, I think he’s just not capable of doing it in the first place.) Sheesh, what a dismally misleading place to be in.

So does that mean I’m going to write a book? Dunno yet. I’m not the one to go about spinning a yarn. I’ll get on to it when I know how to begin and when to finish. Or what to do during the interval. Right now, I’m happy Twittering.

Older. But none the wiser.

I’m racing into the last year of my 20s in my reborn scarlet scooter. And I plan to live it big. Big for me is not a big house, a big car, a big designation, a big bank balance and a big family. Them bigs are what oldies long for.

I, on the other hand, am doing the Benjamin Button thing. Regressing. I would know, ‘cos the first thing door-to-door salesmen ask is if my mom or dad is at home. And the first thing strangers ask is if I am studying. My life has become a Santoor Ad sans kid. I sure hope these questions are a reaction to my appearance and not my mental make-up.

Before I degenerate any further, and particularly before I turn 30, here are some of the things I want to do/get/achieve.

First: I want to be able to write. More often. More fluidly. More intelligently. More humourously. More better.

* I want a Yamaha RX-100. To own. To ride. To never have an accident on.

* I want one of those see-through abdomens. You know, where you can see the ripped muscles through your skin.

* I want to read more. Corollary: I want to make just enough money to buy more books.

* I want to grow my hair as long as it can grow before I shave it all off at 35.

* I want a pair of Ray-Ban Aviators. And I share this ambition with my husband and my brother. So, if either of you guys get it first, I steal!

* I DO NOT ever want to have children. At 30, at 40, at 50, at 60, or until I can’t anymore. Whichever comes first. I would do anything for the people I love. But I love my life too much to waste it on them little beings.

Last: I want to not be lazy anymore. But I doubt I can change that. It’s in my jeans, which incidentally, I’m too lazy to get out of. And although it’s two sizes too big and way too dirty, I still wear them. Or they wear me. My poor parents have had the misfortune of giving birth to two sloth bears. Sigh, and to think all we ever ask for is to sleep. For two more minutes.

So, there you have it. A wish list for the year. I am going to work very hard on the first and the last. The inbetweens will come and go.

Who knows, next year, I might want to start playing with toys or some such Freudian-childish thing.

Dhrishti suthifying (rolling eyes) in wonder.

Bah. Too much eyes I put on my ideal life the last time I broke my leg.

Just when I had sprung back to my feet and had gotten back to a healthy routine of work and workouts, I had another accident, went screeching in an auto to the hospital, wheel-chaired my way into the X-Ray room, discovered a lateral condyle tibia fracture, went into surgery, got two screws fixed below my knee, got a big fat iron brace to hold my leg straight and got sentenced to two months of bed rest. I know I have big-big eyes. But to cast evil sight on myself? Didn’t think I could do it.

Coming to think of it, I wonder how long I have been wallowing in self-contentment. The whole of this year, I have been mighty pleased about starting a moderately successful business venture, spending time the way I want, having enough money to do so, seeing a little of the outside world, building and strengthening friendships, losing weight and a lot of it at that. And every time I think life couldn’t get any better, I’ve been handed a double dose of misfortune – I broke my leg twice, my husband went through surgery twice, two other members of the family did time at the hospital, my company almost closed shop and I almost lost a good friend – the year 2008 couldn’t have been any better. Or any worse.

It’s sad to think that you can’t even feel good about what you have worked so hard to achieve. Sure, modesty is the way to live and all that. But it’s not like I thought I achieved Nirvana. Or that I thought other people still had many rebirths to live before getting to where I was. On second thoughts, maybe I did. Sigh.

Anyway, it’s a lesson learned the hard way. So, no puffing belly and thumping chest this time. And no feeling oh-so-proud about my laziness and finding excuses to encourage it. The fact that the injury has been extremely painful is also keeping my emotions in check. Nevertheless, it doesn’t mean I want people to know I am hurting.

For I’ve begun to realise that underplaying life is the best way to live it. Don’t feel too happy. Don’t feel too sad. Nothing is permanent. And modesty IS really the way to live.

Big foot blues.

I am the laziest person I know. And thanks to life’s little joys, I got a chance to practise lethargy by getting a doctor-endorsed excuse for it. I gave me a broken bone, a baby blue cast and a brilliant way to spend 5 weeks in blissful indolence.

It happened one rainy night when I tried to walk too fast. I lost footing, my ankle twisted, the ligaments tore away a part of the bone and I got a fracture. It doesn’t say much about someone who’s been sacrificing a non-existent social life to 270 evenings in a gym, running away from horrific mirror images, photographic proof and crystal ball visions of corpulence popping out of my ears. Coming to think of it, the 270ish days of strength training could in fact redeem itself by explaining the fact that I endured 7 hours of bus travel, to realise the next morning that I walked home with a fracture after my long weekend holiday at mom-town. The next thing I knew, I was clicking pictures of myself coming out of the hospital on a wheelchair. ‘Cos I was bringing home the biggest reason that I needed to stay home.

And so, without wasting a moment’s time of wastefulness, I shed my gym skin to bare my true sloth bear self. I had make-shift arrangements made to watch endless episodes of downloaded serials, channel surf on the new cable TV set-top box, web surf, charge laptops and phone, eat and drink and L-A-Z-E with a capital hurrah, all without moving an inch!

And whaddya know, I am finally living the life I’ve always dreamed of. My friends come home every day to entertain me. Every visitor wants to do his good deed for the day by helping the poor and needy. (Me being the one coming closest to the aforementioned adjectives.) I get excused from all the tedious relatives’ house-hopping to exchange leaves, nuts and cut-pieces of cheap cloth during festival time because I cannot walk. (I haven’t told them that I can hop). I get to holler for what I want, when I want it. Even if it means making people walk up and down and back and forth to bring stuff, when one trip could’ve fetched everything. (My excuse – I see other people doing what I cannot do and I am gratified by living my life through theirs.) Is that too much for a sick patient to ask? Sympathy votes in favour of a resounding NO.

Before I cast my own evil eyes on my hard-earned nirvana, I should warn myself that it’s all going to come crashing down just like I heard my bone go crack, pop and weasel. That the day I start walking again, all my friends will walk out on me. My well-wishers will shift loyalties to endorsing more pressing social issues. Like preventing domestic wars breaking out over why a certain daughter-in-law didn’t go house-visiting. I will run out of reasons to ask people to do things for me. And I will have to start running doubly fast on the treadmill to undo what 37 days would do to 9 months of sweat and BO.

So when it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee (that I would have to make for myself), I am going to need a better excuse to wear those gym shoes that I am not going to get my lazy ass into. In the meanwhile, I am resorting to cheap tricks like getting a nail-round in my thumb (loose translation for "naga-chuthu" a.k.a. bad-ass pus-forming boil) and getting my tooth pulled out to give my vegetative brain more time to think of sympathy-votes-winning, work-avoiding, timepass-encouraging excuses.

Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus.I am from the dark side of the moon.

Everything about me is irregular. From an asymmetric anatomy to fleeting moments of consciousness, I have the body and mind of a regular schizophrenic. There is no order in my life either. No habits. No clockwork oranges. No daily dosages. No morning potties. No monthly salaries. No 9-5 work days. No summer holidays. No weekend parties. No Monday morning blues. No Saturday night fevers. No Sunday brunches. No vegetarian days. No bad hair days (it’s just generally bad). No girls' night outs. No lady-like behaviour patterns. No motherly instincts. Other than my period, practically everything else in my life comes and goes as and when it pleases.

For the considerably a-for-mango life that I live, I'm not surprised my blog is just as irregular. So what do people like me do to make a habit out of something? More importantly can someone like me even carry on something for long enough to make it a habit in the first place? Not when I like my random lifestyle, I suppose.

Really. Who wants to wake up in the morning knowing exactly what is going to happen every hour, on the hour? Who wants to live a life dictated by calendars, alarm clocks, to-do lists and threaded fingers? If people around you set their clocks according to your do or die “bath at 7:10, office at 9:22, coffee at 10:16, boss-bitching at 11:33, lunch at 1:05, post-lunch gossip till 2:02, catch 40 winks at 3:00 and the 40-B at 5:00, quality family time at 6:35, brush-gargle-floss at 10:15 and kiss husband goodnight at 10:20” schedule, surely, there isn’t any life left to live after the first day, is there?

Compare that to getting up when you want. Not having to fight the 9 am traffic to reach office at 9:31 to find a red mark on the attendance register. Working for a few hours every day and making enough money to sleep off the rest of the month. Or to sponsor phoren holidays once in a while. Not having to minimise that interesting website when the boss does the rounds. Not worrying about that jealous colleague scoring brownie points with the boss by telling him you surf when you should be contributing to the company’s balance sheets. Having foreign films appreciation sessions – oh, who am I kidding – watching movies during weekdays when there is no work. Not knowing when the week ends and the weekend begins. Not knowing when the weekend ends or if it does end at all. Having enough and more time to catch up on all the books you’ve ever wanted to read. Having enough and more time to do nothing.

Hardly as interesting as many people’s lifestyles, I am sure. But at least it’s not half as ridiculous as a work-your-life-off-to-retire-penniless middle class existence. I am happy living an irregular life. At least it means I am doing it in my own terms. Maybe I should just write about it more often.

Rhetoric has answers if you write them yourself.

I contemplated destiny a few months ago. I tore my hair apart with existential angst. I threw some questions out in the open. I thought their characteristic rhetoric will prevent me from finding answers. I thought I’ll never see the light at the end of the tunnel. Who knew someone had switched it off to save the world from global warming?

But seriously, when you think you are waiting for Godot, you know it’s an eternal wait and you habitually suppress all expressions of hope to go on with the life you hate. I did that for a long time. Until I was pushed to the very depths of depression. Until I realised that Godot was actually Mohammed in religious disguise. So I stopped waiting. And I went to Mohammed to find Godot hiding inside a coffee cup.

It was one end-of-the-road afternoon in a backyard coffee shop when a colleague and I looked into each other’s eyes and instinctively said yes. Yes to pulling all stops and beginning life anew. Yes to saying no to everything we had begun to loathe about the industry that employed us. Yes to continue giving it all to the profession we loved. But by stepping out of the confines of orthodoxy and mediocrity. By running away from bonded labour to start a veritable sweatshop of our own.

We began by defining our own rules. By waking up and promising ourselves we’d live our dreams. By swearing we’d find those darned answers ourselves. So we answered our “Then What” by letting go of a seemingly comfortable escapist existence and grabbing hold of a high risk low investment venture; our “Where Do We Go From Here” by going to all our friends and sharing our plans with them; and our “What Do We Do For Money” by crossing our fingers and hoping like hell that this would make us rich.

It’s been a ride through Hurricane Katrina and Tsunami Sunitha ever since. A race against time to learn new skills and refine old ones. An enormous shoechange from the hushed Havaiannas of an introspective writer to the modish Manolos of an aggressive entrepreneur. And a psychic peep through the eye of the storm shows our future smiling back at us.

I wouldn’t say it is something I should have done ages ago. But it sure is the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. Well, what else can I tell you? 1 month. 10 clients. No monies (yet). But all the peace in the world. I think I can safely say I’ve finally found the means to buy my soul back.